Monday, August 26, 2013

Links

“Part of it is just the chaos in the system,” says Ted Shepherd, a Canadian atmospheric physicist based at the University of Reading. Dr. Shepherd, who was a review editor for the portion of the report dealing with near-term predictability, notes the natural variability of Earth’s climate over periods of a few decades still makes it difficult to know exactly how global warming will play out in the short term and on the regional scales that are most relevant to policy makers....“I think governments are pretty convinced that the IPCC knows what it’s talking about,” said Douglas Macdonald, an environmental policy specialist at the University of Toronto. “What’s driving the debate now is that this is an incredibly complex, difficult issue which is going to impose costs on all kinds of people who have got the ability to resist.”

In an interview with Columbia Journalism Review, Justin Gillis has clearly indicated that he writes about climate because he wants to push for action: "the more I learned [about climate], the more I thought to myself, “This is the biggest problem we have—bigger than global poverty. Why am I not working on it?” From there, the question was, how do I get myself into a position to work on the problem?"

At any rate, my preferred temperature record – the satellite-based RSS AMSU dataset – has approached a point in which the global warming trend in the recent 17 years is statistically insignificant and negligible. In fact, if you include the latest 200 months i.e. 16 years and 8 months (from December 1997 through July 2013 included) into your calculation of linear regression, you get a negative warming trend!

“Wind farms definitely affect house prices and it is highly likely that this report will come to that conclusion…I would expect there to be billions of pounds of planning blight because of wind turbines close to properties…. It’s almost like elements of DECC are acting like a mafia … now you’ve got DECC trying to stick its dirty great footprints all over another department’s work. While this is unsurprising, it will all unravel in the end and I’m sure the evidence will come out soon that proves a number of these points correct.”